Progressive Delivery: Build the Right Thing for the Right People at the Right Time

by James Governor, Kimberly Harrison, Heidi Waterhouse

Progressive Delivery knocks down the wall separating software users from software makers. Technology leaders face a fundamental How do you know you’re delivering the right thing to the right person at the right time? Progressive Delivery offers a fresh perspective on this question, bridging the gap between software delivery and business value. Drawing from extensive interviews with industry leaders at GitHub, Adobe, AWS, Disney, and Nike, the authors demonstrate how four key elements—abundance, autonomy, alignment, and automation—create a framework for sustainable product development. This isn’t just another technical manual or transformation playbook. Instead, it provides a lens for measuring your existing products against future standards and expectations. Through detailed case studies, you’ll How to leverage cloud abundance for meaningful experimentation. Ways to enable team autonomy while maintaining coherent direction. Strategies for aligning technical capabilities with business goals. Methods to automate intelligently while preserving control. The authors bring over 60 years of combined experience advising companies on technology adoption, engineering practices, and product strategy. Their insights show how organizations can move beyond traditional development cycles to create personalized experiences that truly serve their users. If you’re responsible for product strategy, engineering, or digital experiences, this book will help you focus your team’s energy efficiently and deliver value that matters to all stakeholders, both within and outside your organization.

240 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 4, 2025

Reviews

[Steve Fenton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although some of the longer-toothed Agile and DevOps folks will say, and correctly, the user has always been a crucial part of the whole, this book pins user-centricity neatly into the picture alongside practical techniques that enable software teams to deliver evolutionary change that brings joy to everyone involved.

The practical framework goes a long way to delivering on the promise and attention is paid to those pesky cultural problems that often trip up efforts to do better.

[Sebastian Sanio · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book presents a framework to "build the right thing, for the right people, at the right time" (what the cover says), based on four pillars: abundance, autonomy, alignment and automation
Each chapter focuses on one of the pillars or presents a case study
While the framework makes sense, the book is too repetitive and filled with unnecessary content, it's the typical case of a book that could have been a blog post or an essay